Department of Economics, Queen's University

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research

scroll down for links to my working papers and publications

Major ongoing research projects

Theoretical models of strategic information production and disclosure

Much of my past research has involved theoretical models of information production and disclosure by agents competing over the allocation of scarce resources. Most of this work can be loosely interpreted as lobbying, whether it is interest groups lobbying politicians, or entrepreneurs lobbying investors. I continue to actively work in this area. Current working papers include research showing how politicians may have an incentive to remain clueless on policy, and why investors may not want to perfectly observe the financial performance of the firms competing for investment capital.

IGATE Zimbabwe

In 2012, the Department for International Development (DFID) UK launched The Girl’s Education Challenge (GEC) to distribute £300 million across 37 projects in 18 countries. “Improving Girls’ Access through Transforming Education” (IGATE) is one of these programs, targeting girls in rural Zimbabwe. IGATE introduces a set of nine individual interventions into randomly selected schools/communities in 10 districts in rural Zimbabwe. The interventions are intended to work together to empower adolescent girls, increase community and family support, and provide resources in order to improve academic and nonacademic outcomes. The program reached a total of 465 rural schools which were randomly selected for treatment. In total, 48,773 girls who lived the treatment school catchment areas participated in the IGATE project.

I’m working with World Vision, the NGO that implemented the program, and Limestone Analytics to provide a detailed analysis of the project’s impact, and to write a series of academic papers presenting the findings. The first papers: “Does empowering girls improve their math performance? Evidence from rural Zimbabwe” will be available soon.

Promoting human capital development among students in Chicago

A series of field experiments intended to improve our understanding of why some groups of kids are more likely than others to exert effort academically. Brent Hickman, John List, Joe Price and I conduct series of field experiments within public schools in the Chicago area. The first paper, “Productivity Versus Motivation: Combining Field Experiments with Structural Econometrics to Study Adolescent Human Capital Production,” will be available soon, and will be followed by a second paper on looking at which kids get the most out of smaller group sizes and more one-on-one attention.

Threshold public goods experiments on charitable giving and crowdfunding

A series of lab experiments exploring how donors choose between alternative projects. The first paper, “Donor coordination and project funding” with Corazzini and Valbonesi appeared the Journal of Public Economics. Ongoing work with Corazzini and Reggiani looks at how aid organizations may help overcome coordination problems among donors. I was awarded a four year SSHRC Insight Grant for work with Corazzini and Tergiman to extend work in the area to allow heterogeneity among donors.